LONDON – A new research center opened its doors Wednesday at Britain's Cambridge University to look at the implications -- good and bad -- of artificial intelligence. Professor Stephen Hawking, who was due to speak at the center's launch later on Wednesday, said: "The rise of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. "We do not yet know which. The research done by this center will be crucial to the future of our civilization and of our species," he said. Making sure AI is used to benefit humanity is the express aim of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), funded by a 10 million ( 12.3 million) grant from the Leverhulme Trust. A collaboration between the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Berkeley, California, the CFI will see researchers from multiple disciplines work with industry representatives and policymakers on projects ranging from regulation of autonomous weapons to the implications of AI for democracy. Its practical applications can help us to tackle important social problems, as well as easing many tasks in everyday life," said Margaret Boden, a professor of cognitive sciences and consultant to the CFI.

A record 889 people under 18 fell victim to sex crimes and other offenses perpetrated via social networking services from January to June, the National Police Agency said Thursday. The number is 33 higher than the tally from July to December last year, marking the highest level since data on a half-year basis became available in 2008. As a breeding ground for sex crimes, Twitter and other largely unregulated SNS sites overtook dating sites, which are bound by regulations including a minimum age rule of 18, analysts said. Of the total, 348, or 40 percent, fell prey to indecent acts, 268 to child pornography and 225 to prostitution. Eight children, including some as young as 11, were raped, and 13 abducted.

Why is this ad appearing on this site? This was a frequent questions both advertisers and publishers asked of Google. Behind the scenes, machine learning models match the best ad to the best website, given a set of constraints including budget and the dynamics of the ad auction. To untangle the decision chain across the many different targeting systems to answer the question is a knotty task indeed. In March, the head of Google research Peter Norvig spoke at MIT.

While major tech companies are in a race to develop real-life artificial intelligence applications, self-aware AI might come sooner than you think. Major companies in the tech industry are racing to implement artificial intelligence technology into smartphones and other internet-linked devices in order to make them think like people. CBS News reports that artificial intelligence (AI) projects at Carnegie Mellon aim to bring this emerging technology closed to our daily life. F0r instance, the CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform is a robot designed to perform dangerous tasks in situations that would put humans in too much risk, such as the 2011 disaster in Japan, at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Because CHIMP is designed to be able to work independently in disastrous conditions, it needs both mental and manual good skills.

On Oct. 13, 2016, the White House hosted the "White House Frontiers Conference" (#WHFrontiers) on the #FutureofAI. The White House had also released two reports on artificial intelligence ("AI") the previous day: (1) Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence on the current state of AI, the existing and potential applications of AI, and the societal and public policy questions relevant to AI, and (2) The National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan for Federally-funded research and development in AI. As stated in the Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence report, "Future AI systems could perform predictive analytics to anticipate cyberattacks by generating dynamic threat models from available data sources that are voluminous, ever-changing, and often incomplete." To this end, a representative from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the #WHFrontiers conference highlighted the "promise of artificial intelligence" in view of the recent Cyber Grand Challenge. The DARPA representative stated that, with artificial intelligence, cyber-attacks could be addressed in minutes and not hours, days, or months.

Tesla says that all the cars it produces will now be capable of driving completely autonomously. A video released on Thursday shows a demo of a car driving itself – with a human in the seat "only there for legal reasons". The car appear to pull out of a garage before a man gets in. The vehicle then sets off, the steering wheel moving while the driver's hands remain hovering just above it. The video ends with the car pulling off a manoeuvre tricky to many human drivers: parallel parking. The video – which is admittedly rather stylised – follows Tesla's announcement on Wednesday that all cars produced in its factories from now will be equipped with "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver".

The term "robo-advisor" was essentially unheard-of just five years ago, but it is now commonplace in the financial landscape. The term is misleading and doesn't involve robots at all. Rather, robo-advisors (companies such as Betterment, Wealthfront, and others) are algorithms built to calibrate a financial portfolio to the goals and risk tolerance of the user. Users enter their goals (for example, retiring at age 65 with 250,000.00 in savings), age, income, and current financial assets. The advisor (which would more accurately be referred to as an "allocator") then spreads investments across asset classes and financial instruments in order to reach the user's goals. The system then calibrates to changes in the user's goals and to real-time changes in the market, aiming always to find the best fit for the user's original goals.

This tutorial was designed for easily diving into TensorFlow, through examples. It is suitable for beginners who want to find clear and concise examples about TensorFlow. For readability, the tutorial includes both notebook and code with explanations. Some examples require MNIST dataset for training and testing. Don't worry, this dataset will automatically be downloaded when running examples (with input_data.py).

DeepMind is now capable of teaching itself based on information it already possesses. In a significant step forward for artificial intelligence, Alphabet's hybrid system -- called a Differential Neural Computer (DNC) -- uses the existing data storage capacity of conventional computers while pairing it with smart AI and a neural net capable of quickly parsing it. TNW NYC is our New York technology event for anyone interested in helping their company grow. "These models can learn from examples like neural networks, but they can also store complex data like computers," wrote DeepMind researchers Alexander Graves and Greg Wayne. Much like the brain, the neural network uses an interconnected series of nodes to stimulate specific centers needed to complete a task.

Two years ago Stephen Hawking told the BBC that the development of full artificial intelligence, could spell the end of the human race. His was not the only voice warning of the dangers of AI - Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak also expressed their concerns about where the technology was heading - though Professor Hawking's was the most apocalyptic vision of a world where robots decide they don't need us any more. What all of these prophets of AI doom wanted to do was to get the world thinking about where the science was heading - and make sure other voices joined the scientists in that debate. That they have achieved that aim was evident on Wednesday night at an event in Cambridge marking the opening of the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, designed to do some of that thinking about the implications of AI. And Professor Hawking was there to help launch the centre.